Bonnard's Art

Why It Matters

The Christie's auction will bring Bonard’s hidden oeuvre to market, potentially redefining his influence on modern art and offering investors a rare opportunity to acquire works that bridge the Nabis and later avant‑garde.

Key Takeaways

• Bonard settled early in Montmartre, immersed in its bohemian life.
• Claude Terrasse collection reveals previously unknown Bonard works across mediums.
• Bonard experimented with diverse supports: wood, cardboard, canvas, pastel.
• His art bridges figuration and abstraction, influencing 20th‑century avant‑garde.
• Upcoming Christie's auction on April 14 will showcase the Terrasse collection.

Summary

The video, hosted in a Montmartre studio, introduces Gill Gentil, a Nabis specialist, who explains the link between the district and painter Pierre Bonard, and previews the upcoming Christie's sale of the Claude Terrasse collection.

Gentil emphasizes Bonard’s early immersion in Montmartre’s cafés, cabarets and the Moulin Rouge, noting that the collection offers unprecedented access to works previously unseen by the public or scholars. The assemblage spans more than six decades, from an 1880 drawing made when Bonard was thirteen to a 1946 garden scene painted a year before his death, illustrating his evolution across Impressionism, Fauvism, Cubism and Surrealism.

Bonard’s artistic practice was marked by relentless experimentation with media—pencil, watercolor, gouache, pastel, oil on canvas, wood panels and cardboard—each chosen for its material effect. Representative pieces include ‘L’homme au prise avec les chiens’ on wood, where grain becomes part of the image, and the near‑abstract ‘Ruel dans le midi.’ He famously said, ‘Le dessin, c’est l’émotion; le tableau, c’est le raisonnement,’ underscoring his balance of feeling and formal logic.

The sale, scheduled for 14 April at Christie's Paris, not only provides collectors with rare Bonard pieces but also prompts a reassessment of his role as a conduit between the Nabis and later avant‑garde movements. Recognizing his versatile technique and thematic breadth could reshape market valuations and scholarly narratives about early 20th‑century French art.

Original Description

Settling in Montmartre at an early age, Bonnard observed the life around him — from the cabarets of the Moulin Rouge to the neighborhood’s café-concerts — nourishing a body of work in which emotion, color, and experimentation intertwine.

On the occasion of the sale Dans l’intimité de Pierre Bonnard: Collection Claude Terrasse, presented at Christie’s in Paris, discover a group of works that have remained within the family of Claude Terrasse, Pierre Bonnard’s brother-in-law.

Early drawings, late paintings, unpublished works: a rare immersion into the studio and the artistic friendship that bound Pierre Bonnard to the composer Claude Terrasse.

Dans l’intimité de Pierre Bonnard : Collection Claude Terrass, April 14.

On view, April 9–14.

Christie’s thanks the artist Ophélia Jacarini for her contribution to the creation of the video.